Across the European Union, September is “people’s month”. It’s only people’s month, of course, because the politicians say it is. But let’s not be ungrateful or cynical. For these few early-autumn weekends the general public is being allowed, indeed encouraged, to look round public and private buildings across the EU that are normally off-limits.

And yes, that even includes buildings in secretive, classbound Britain. If you are English you’ll have to hurry: our “Heritage Days” take place this weekend only. But in Scotland and Wales there are “open door” days every weekend in September. And London has its access-all-areas event (Open House London) next weekend, when the curious can flock into such lustrous mansions of wisdom and integrity as HM Treasury and the Foreign Office. (You can also visit the Home Office, but only if you bring photographic identification and submit yourself to body scans and bag searches – which says a lot, I think, about that dismal ministry’s attitude to the public it supposedly serves.)

The idea generally is to entice us to look more closely at the architecture around us – striking, beautiful, grittily functional or simply weird – by offering this brief glimpse behind the barricades separating the privileged few from the public many. And on the back of these European Heritage Days, several other organisations have launched resourceful initiatives of their own.

Next Friday night, for instance, as a prelude to Open House London, more than 1,000 people will embark on a 20-mile “night hike” across London. It will start late in the evening, finish at dawn, and take in such architectural jewels as Somerset House, Horse Guards, Tower Bridge and the Royal Geographical Society – all of which undoubtedly will look very atmospheric in the 4am mist. Walkers are expected to be sponsored, and the money goes to the cancer charity Maggie’s Centres. The atmosphere should be great, the urban scenery spectacular, and the cause certainly worthy.

Add-on events like that make these Heritage Days even more valuable. But I do wonder why they are confined to one month of the year. After all, our taxes pay for the upkeep of a huge number of fine buildings that are usually out of bounds to us. I’d like to see Britain move towards a permanent “open house” culture, in which the norm is for public buildings to be permanently accessible. And I would also like to see a massive overhaul of opening hours for museums, galleries, cathedrals, libraries and public monuments, to bring them more into line with the 24/7 lifestyle of 21st-century Britain.

Yes, there would be staffing, funding and security implications. But too often in Britain, I think, those issues are used as excuses to mask a deep-seated, and fundamentally undemocratic, aversion to giving the public a right of access to buildings they actually own and fund.

Perhaps David Cameron’s resurgent Tories should make this a plank of their cultural manifesto. But I can’t help noticing that although several exclusive London clubs (including the Reform and the Travellers) are opening their doors to hoi polloi next weekend, they don’t include that bastion of Conservative grandees, the Carlton Club. Next year, perhaps.

www.heritage-days.net, www.maggiescentres.org/night-hike

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